


Prologos

by Opacifica



Series: Tailspinning Into the Epilogues with Dirk and Jake [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: But You Know. Funny Sadstuck., Character Study, Ex Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Ult!Dirk, Jakeisms, M/M, Post-Canon, RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH, Sadstuck, Sadstuck For The Discerning Jakeliker, Trans Male Character, pre-epilogues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:00:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23961157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: You don’t pity him. It would be senseless to pity him, like pitying a storm or a mountain or God.
Relationships: Jake English/Dirk Strider
Series: Tailspinning Into the Epilogues with Dirk and Jake [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1819627
Comments: 9
Kudos: 81





	Prologos

The sound of wind screaming past the window and rain hammering on the pane itself isn’t what wakes you. It’s the unfamiliarity of the noise, not the volume. You’ve lived on Earth C for bordering on six years, now. It’s a paradise planet in almost all senses of the word. Summer showers, warm and gentle rains spotted with sunlight where the clouds break, the cycle of precipitation continues, but it doesn’t really storm.

Not like this, violent enough to shake the apartment situated precariously atop the main body of the house. The thunder rolls through the structure, a palpable thing, even cozied up on the couch as you are.

It’s pitch dark outside, the glossy black surface of the windows only occasionally broken up by white bursts of lightning. You must have fallen asleep this afternoon, after showering, shoring up the worst of your bumps and bruises, and swapping out for your laying-around shorts in the aftermath of yet another emotionally and physically punishing round of RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH. You really should have thought that name through a little better. He's been very clear on it having been a near irredeemably stupid decision of yours - well, fine, not like you run the social media anymore anyway, that was... what, three falling-outs ago? He could've thought of something better, but you had to push a stupid, dumb, meaningless name as a Twitter joke, and now you are stuck with it, and stuck with a reminder of that whole hullabaloo plastered frequently across your ass, where at least _you_ can’t see it. What a fucking joy.

Cold blue light emanates from the television. It's set to the TV guide, so you must have nodded off while trying to pick something suitable to watch. The clock on the monitor, in the upper left corner, reads ‘22:49’. Late, but not _that_ late. Just in the sense that you’ve probably gotten an impromptu six hour nap in there before bedtime.

Ah, well. Much needed. You shift on the couch and proceed to wince and fall back into your original position as you are reminded of every bruise and laceration, even bandaged and attended-to to they are. Something about the stiffness of just-woke-up, the lingering haze of exhaustion. Someone will have to negotiate a sitdown with Janey before the next bout. He really did a number on you this time, didn’t he. 

All appearances, sentiments, and bruises to the contrary, you always _win_ , at least in the eyes of the crowd. Dirk insists that he doesn’t mind; the show runs on this consistent outcome. Your eyes glazed over a tad as he explained the system of ‘face’ and ‘heel’ characters, the media-philosophical underpinnings of professional wrestling as translated to your scrumming about. You could practically see the Wikipedia page open behind his redesigned shades. No more AR tripping him up. Just a placid, workable AI all plugged in to his brain, augmenting his capacity to explain things he doesn’t technically understand himself.

It doesn’t seem quite fair. You’d prefer it if it were fair, if you had the chance to earn even a smidgen of it. He gives as good as he gets, that’s for fucking sure, but he never _wins_. No one cheers for him when he pulls one of his brilliant maneuvers, leverages that low center of gravity, turns your theoretical physical advantages in terms of height and weight into the means of your always-temporary defeat. It just doesn’t seem exactly kosher. You don’t like feeling in his debt, particularly when there’s no path forward to repay it. All you can really do is hope he’ll take whatever the hell it is he wants from you in recompense.

Easier said than done.

While you didn’t register it at first, you’re not alone in the living room of Dirk’s apartment-cum-workshop. He’s fallen asleep himself, on a desk strewn in equal measure with papers, three different laptops, robot shit, and who the fuck knows what else. His shades are off, which is just as well, because he might nick an artery on the damn things if he napped on them the wrong way. Of course he’d be as tuckered out by the whole thing as you are. It’s easy to forget that he’s not an automaton himself, when he looks so very much like the one that used to be your only humanoid companion, hunkered down in the corner, bathed in the blueish light of the television, the rise and fall of his chest concealed beneath his slumped posture.

You don’t think there was anything particularly special about this episode’s filming. It’s Friday night, and the finale isn’t for two days more, the wait dragged out to maximize suspense. But things have been tense and exhausting enough without an actual match to bring them to a head. You’re certain you invited yourself back to his digs with the thought of having some kind of talk, only to chicken out as the two of you lapsed seamlessly into what has become your primary means of interacting. You exist, in parallel, in a space that could be loosely described as ‘shared’. He works, you do something useless and distracting and take care not to bother him. Don’t enquire about what he’s up to; there’s no way he’d appreciate having to explain, you figure. His designs, as always, are somewhat impenetrable to you. It makes you feel a real dullard, having to ask. You’ve known him for such a long time. Shouldn’t you have some sense of intuition, by now?

Increasingly, you wonder if you’ve ever known him. Who it is you know, if not the man draped over his desk, motionless. Even in the dim glow of the screen, you’re close enough to see his bruises, too. Largely untended. A massive one down the length of his bicep, from absorbing a fall that didn’t quite coincide with the mat. His jaw, distorted slightly and darkened with broken capillaries. Not fractured. The consort medic confirmed as much before he shook the fellow away and got back to it.

Something in your stomach flutters, when he does things like that. Things a person ought not to be able to do, that remind you how there’s no one in this world quite like him. A thousand-thousand hands on your body and none of them would be his, calloused around the grip of his katana, scarred and broken and healed. You’re not going to find him in any of them.

Of course not. You know exactly where he is, no need for true north, a GPS, or a magnetized needle floating in a cap full of water. While he has his own home, he’s almost always to be found in his little workshop-apartment situated above your sprawling mansion, high up enough to see the ocean from the window, far enough removed that he won’t have the drowning nightmares that happen sometimes when he dreams too near the sea. 

You recall many a night on LOMAX, him waking in a cold sweat from within his sleeping bag, curled protectively around his own chest, knuckles flexing frantically until he found his sword.

Watching him, then as now, not understanding, but wishing you did. Wishing you knew what to say, wishing that _anything_ you said wouldn’t have him retreating behind a veritable wall of ice, silent for the rest of the day, never quite managing to succumb to sleep again.

You wonder if he’s dreaming. You prefer it, yourself, when you don’t. A little too much happening up in the old noggin for comfort, too much liable to percolate back in, making it difficult to sequester anew once you wake. Making it horrifically awkward to face Jane, Jade, not to mention Dirk himself. You must believe those things about them, or you wouldn’t _think them_ , or they wouldn’t _come to you_ , the second the boundaries of consciousness and your carefully constructed mental fortifications are no longer in place to stave them off. It all comes creeping back.

But he’s never felt anything like that. You know for dead certain that there’s no power in this world that could render Dirk truly weak and helpless and pathetic. Even if it did, so what? He’d render it, and himself, abundantly wrong about the whole situation the next day and could dismiss the thought forever, having been conclusively proven untrue. He’s not all or any of those things. He’s solid as a statue carved from mahogany, pertinacious as a fucking glacier.

The ocean itself might drown him, _might_ get the best of him that way.

You, for your part, are lounging about in hot pink RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH booty shorts, and the ass they cling to is too fiercely sore to so much as _move_ without wincing. Because you’re not him, you’re so many things other than him, and he’s so many things you’ll never be. 

So you probably ought to give up the ghost, so far as modeling what the shit might be going on behind his stilled lashes, beneath his meticulously coiffed hair. It’s _not for you to know_. He’s snapped more-or-less as much, when you’ve probed too clumsily. And you’ve snapped back, just as sure. Not recently. It’s been months since you had a real go at it, in any sense of the phrase.

That’s the exhausting thing. The ‘not discussing it’. Like treading water in calm seas, easy at first, a relief, even, since there’s no further risk of violent capsize.

But it wears at you.

And there’s no catharsis to be had in mutual beating-to-a-pulp-smanship when you no longer voice your discontent, when there’s no bloody sis to cathar! Just a slow spiral downward, sometimes so gradual that you hardly see it happening until you realize it’s been weeks since you actually _spoke_ , not just talked past each other at best or ignored each other at worst, without a camera or a producer present. Despite the fact that you ostensibly share a habitation, despite the fact that you are maybe two fucking meters from him as you think these poisonous thoughts.

There’s no running away from him, though. Nowhere to hide, as _grim_ and unfair as that sounds. He’s not chasing you. He’s just _here_ , in this little apartment, inaccessible to anyone without the gift of flight. 

It towers above the rest of your mansion, a monument to the fact that every second you’re not fixing this odd rift, this unbridgeable asynchrony, is a second that the chasm widens and the situation grows less fixable. And he grows further and further away, even with his bootprint bruised into your face, even physically close enough that you could practically stretch out and touch him.

What a fine mess you’ve made. 

When you squint, you can almost see it in the haze of blue light, illuminated by lightning flashes, something tangible but invisible between you, a ghost net floating languidly on deep-ocean currents, innocuous until you try to swim through it and wind up beached, bloated, a gasping behemoth suffocating beneath its own weight on shore, and no closer to reaching him for it.

You force yourself to grit your teeth through the pain and stand, to retrieve the remote, to turn off the television and dispel the mental image. 

It’s dark as ever, but you’ve adjusted to it, more or less, and you can still make out his outline on your way to the capacious restroom, the one part of the apartment that defies his spartan interior decorating sensibilities. You could navigate through this space in true darkness, with your eyes plucked from your skull. Not only because of its smallness, but because of its familiarity. You’ve passed a lot of time here. Maybe too much.

His mirror, since your last visit, has been taken down, leaving the wall above the sink bare. You frown at that. How’s he been doing his hair, then? Odd, to say the least, but not an obstacle to your retrieving the forest-green toothbrush he bought for you, for nights exactly such as this one, scrubbing up, doing your best without a visual aid to re-clean and replace the antibiotic ointment on the literal tread marks on your cheek. 

Lands’ sakes alive, you really are a bit cut up. You know you should’ve gone to Janey straightaway, but you never do, even when it’s worse than this. Not until he insists, and even then, you nudge him into going with you.

You’re not scared of her. That would be absurd. You love her, actually, and that’s the problem. The entire problem with making use of her services as a medic, smiling blandly across the table as a dinner escort on occasion, and otherwise blinking uncomprehendingly at her pale blue text when it graces your phone screen.

You love her, and you trust her, and you know, for a fact, that she in her right mind has never done anything but look out for your best interests, no matter how difficult or punishing you made her altruism. You know she’d smile sincerely, press a palm to your cheek, and that you would feel better. She could help you. You would just have to ask.

And you can’t ask. You can’t ask anything more from her, after everything you’ve already taken. Everything she lost on your account, dignity and autonomy as much as anything, you should have _helped_ her, shouldn’t have snivelled uselessly as the Batterwitch took her mind, she had every right to be incensed, still does, every single _time_ you let her down…

Even when she prompts you, even when she inquires after Dirk, asks explicitly how the two of you are holding up, you can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, because it did, and then there’s the matter of how you still see it when she touches you, even to heal you, and that is the unfairest fucking thing of all. She is trying so hard to mend things, the same way she knits your flesh and bones back together when you carelessly break yourself, every time.

It won’t work until she manages to dig her fingers in and do something about your brain, too.

So you go on loving her, completely and unreservedly and silently. And you let her down in a million small ways rather than voicing the one dauntingly massive elephant in the room. Not to her, not to Dirk, not to Roxy, not to anyone. Keeping the horrible bits away from them all is the closest you get to anything noble or heroic, these days.

You splash cool water on your face. Blindly straighten your hair without knowing the results. Not much chance of your getting back to sleep tonight. Dirk doesn’t keep alcohol in his apartment, on account of Rose visiting so often and his presumably thinking that the habit is rather pathetic of you, but you’ve got some phenomenally cheap pink moscato in one of your fridges or the other with your fucking name on it, and maybe you’ll message him, then, from the safety of your empty California king, and start a fight over something stupid, and he’ll have to talk to you. 

Sort of how you were intending to talk this afternoon. What a resounding success _that_ has been.

At least when you’re this unaccountably morose, about nothing so much as your own total inutility, you don’t luminesce at all. That might wake him up, now that the television is off and it’s just the lightning storm occasionally illuminating the proceedings. 

Rather than walking out, you hover with each step, not putting your weight down on the bare cement floor. You’re arrested, though, by the sound of the rain beating relentlessly on the glass, louder out here, and the flash of light that casts his face in stark relief. He doesn’t truly _relax_ , even in sleep, a tension to the set of his brow and his lips.

Dear lord, he’s out cold on a nest of wires, some component he’s been soldering. It looks about as uncomfortable as sleeping on a mound of fire ants. Your stomach twists. He’d rather you let him alone. It galls him, even thinking that the way you feel about him might be pity. That, he’s never told you, but he doesn’t have to say it. You understand that much about him.

As you watch, wavering at the door, his grimace deepens, and he shifts in sleep, exposing indents created by the impromptu wire-pillow for a second. You’re not so far gone that you don’t wince with empathy on his behalf.

You retreat to his room, strip one of the numerous pillows from his bed without snooping around or anything, and decide that will have to do. Now there is just the comparatively complicated task of actually getting the damned thing under his face, that he might not be in such dire straits when he wakes up. The difficulty of the business intensified by his rather unpleasantly swollen jaw.

 _Not broken_ , you remind yourself, and cup him by the face, sliding the pillow in stealthily as you sweep the wires to the side.

Lightning arcs across the sky, turning the scene outside of the window pale grey, followed near-instantaneously by a foundation-shaking clap of thunder. The storm is directly on top of you. His eyes flutter open with a start before you can complete the maneuver.

Uncharacteristically, he freezes rather than lashing out. You’ve had plenty of waking-him-up related misadventures in your time, and most of them ended with a fist to the face and a fervent apology on his part, a short, embarrassed explanation of ‘hypervigilance’, which you understood, in a strange way. Never held it against him. Just learned to be more careful. Now, he locks eyes with you in the dark, no sound beneath the softer thunder of rain on the roof, against the walls, the window.

“You fell asleep at your desk,” you tell him, as though that wasn’t obvious.

He blinks, not pulling away from your hand, though you can feel the tension in his posture.

“Where’re you going?” he asks.

“Ah, just back to the ol’ abode, figure I may as well leave you to it, the whole sleeping business. Hell, I’ve more or less gotten my fill of it, really, just going to putter about and… I don’t know.”

Good lord, sometimes it’s as though your mouth moves on its own. You could’ve said as much in half the words, right? Inefficient. Airtime is money. You bore people when you ramble, you can feel it happening, you _hate_ that feeling but it only keeps you going, adds momentum, keeps you talking, wishing for their attention back.

“S’a fuckin’ hurricane out there,” Dirk says blearily, then pauses. “You don’t have to go.”

You know _that_.

“Couch pulls out,” he adds, after you’re silent for too long, correctly guessing what you’re thinking about his proposition.

The clarification on what’s being offered doesn’t mean he’d say ‘no’ to you. His bed is much smaller than yours, hardly a full-sized mattress, but you’ve slept in it no less often than your own, or did, back in the early days.

You wish you knew what to say to him. That you ever knew what to say to him.

“I’d rather not impose,” you say quietly, your hand falling to your side.

“You don’t impose.”

He rubs at his face with the heels of his hands, wincing as he does so. Even his typical stoic countenance can’t conceal the damage you’ve done to each other this afternoon, and that’s a double-edged relief, that you’re not just being damnably pathetic about it, that it affects him, too.

Up close, it’s clear that his hair _has_ dried a little funny, since his last shower. It’s one thing for the stylists to put to rights, a separate thing entirely to manage with his mirror down and shoved against the wall. Another lightning strike, another peal of thunder, and the hollows beneath his eyes are put in stark relief. You know he doesn’t get enough sleep. He never has, never really adjusted to the idea of unconsciousness, after so long switching between Derse and his drowned Earth residence. You were there for that part.

It’s another thing entirely to be _reminded of it_ , though, without makeup for the cameras and shades to hide whatever sticks of colored goop and an hour in the chair can’t cover.

You exhale slowly. You don’t pity him. It would be senseless to pity him, like pitying a storm or a mountain or God.

The thing about seeing him properly is that you are also forced to remember how handsome he is. Perhaps not classically, perhaps more boyish than one would expect by twenty-two and distorted by exhaustion as well as blunt force trauma. But there’s always been something noble about the set of his brow, the delicateness of his bone structure, the softness of his mouth, even when curled slightly in disapproval.

It’s not, now. He’s not frowning. He’s just watching you, waiting for you to do something. One hell of a role reversal. He doesn’t make a habit of waiting much. But you suspect whatever dream you’ve roused him from has got him in a different place than normal. Perhaps not yet a full-blown nightmare - no telltale sheen of sweat on his forehead, too steady for that - but the beginning of one, preempted by your interruption.

Maybe he’s grateful. Maybe you did the right thing, somehow, unlikely as it seems, when you are basically the reigning world champion of waltzing your way through this particular minefield, treading expertly on every one.

“I miss you,” you tell him.

Sometimes sincerity is best. You spend between ten and twenty-four hours in or adjacent to his company, your schedule largely under his supervision, most days. That doesn’t mean you don’t miss him. You do.

Before he can say anything else, you’re leaning down to press your lips to his, quite on impulse. It’s stupid. It’s _not_ in keeping with your current character arc on RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH, that all-important determinant of propriety. It’s been months since you kissed him. Just a light brush between you, nothing he can’t jerk away from if it’s a grave mistake.

He doesn’t flinch. Stiffens incrementally - but he was already tense. Relaxes just a little, when your hand comes up to caress his shoulder. There’s not a lot of skin that isn’t in some way damaged, which is to say that you truly don’t _mean_ to come to rest right at the epicenter of the worst of it, but.

“Careful,” he cautions you through gritted teeth, but he doesn’t say ‘stop’, and he kisses you hungrily, taking lead, leaning harder into your grip. His breathing is already labored. Bruised ribs, then, on top of everything. He _does_ have a nasty habit of lying to the on-site medics, but then again, so do you. Your mistruths just tend to carry more weight in terms of the fabric of reality.

You lift him like a doll, letting your powers of flight do most of the work for you, kissing him ceaselessly to preempt his protest that he can walk on his own just fine. He doesn’t fight it, as you shift him into a bridal carry, just digs the pads of his fingers into the back of your neck for support, tries to relax into your arms, and tugs at your lower lip with his teeth when he feels you’ve slowed down too much.

Not with any intention to hurt you. He’s being as gentle with you as you are with him, no broken skin, no ferocity. Just heat and hunger.

You spend so much time fixating on how he might hurt you next, how to hurt him before he gets the chance. It’s a familiar game for both of you, so well-refined that it can’t _not_ be consumed en-masse by a content-hungry population. It is perilously easy to forget, of course, wrapped up in all of that, oiled and gleaming in stage lights, bleeding freely, breathing ragged, heart pounding on your ears, just how well you know this part of him, too.

Even at his worst, you’ve always been able to gentle him with a touch. As long as you've known him, he’s been starving for it. For all you’ve torn him open so very many times, he doesn’t fight you when you lay him down on his bed, still propped up on cinderblocks, years after you built this home. The quality of the mattress speaks to one of his few indulgences. He likes to sleep comfortably. You picked it out with him.

What was so different about _then_?

You flick on a little bedside lamp, spilling warm, golden light over the both of you as you lean back in, situate yourself over him, minding the most obvious of the damage.

With your body on top of his, you press him carefully, by the relatively uninjured right shoulder, into the duvet as your hands roam over his chest, the familiar slope of his ribcage, the dense muscle of his abdomen. You smile at his sharp intake of breath when you finally break away from his lips and press your mouth to the cartilaginous ridges of his trachea, just beneath the gnarled black scar of his last heroic death.

Nothing was different, then. Nothing at all. This is something outside of time. You suck lightly at his throat. You can feel it against your tongue when he chokes on his harsh gasp of pleasure.

He still binds, when there are cameras running, but only rarely does so around the house. It’s not just a matter of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ days, he told you, once, back when things were easier. Just a style thing, the shape of his chest doesn’t need to be a federal fucking issue, and it’s not like he’s trying to impress you, _baka_.

These days, of course, with his ambitions, the talks he has with Janey, everything might as well be exactly that level of federal-ism, and ‘issue’ is a forgone conclusion. Everything has to change, when he has the eyes of an audience. It isn’t just when you’re in the midst of a heated bout. You hardly recognize him in televised interviews, his back faux-casually shy of ramrod-straight, his movements calculated, his accent nearly gone and his voice pressed as low and uninflected as it gets.

Every which way, there has always been something to admire about him. How it feels like a secret between you, the ease with which he slouches around his workshop in a pair of your boxers and nothing else, enraptured by his latest prototype or hunched over his laptop, typing manically away or scribbling at his tablet as you stroke his hair and watch dumb cartoons. How he becomes a character, takes up three times as much space, commands the respect of a _king_ , not merely a prince, when it comes time to perform. Even as you muscle him down, trounce him thoroughly, he holds fast to his dignity, nails dug all the way in. Nothing he does is accidental.

He’s bare-chested beneath his tank top, tonight, and the main obstacle to getting his damned shirt off is the way he winces involuntarily any time you get too friendly with the outside of his left arm, the massive purple-black bruise, the shoulder they had to pop back in before he could pick up his sword. You slow down. He has to help you with his free arm, and everything grinds to a halt for a moment as you carefully extract him from the garment.

His frustration at being the cause of a hold up, while unvoiced, is palpable. But you maintain the even more languid pace, even once the shirt has been chucked across the room, good fucking riddance. You strip your own hilarious t-shirt with a picture of one of the mecha thingies from Neon Genesis Evangelion off and send it flying in the same direction. It would only outrage him slightly to hear you call it that, heh.

You resume kissing him, though now when he hauls you in to deepen it, you can feel his pulse through your chests pressed together. You are acutely aware of all of it, the checked power coiled in his limbs, his fingers twined in your hair, the slightest scrape of his teeth against your lip, your knee wedged between his legs, supporting your weight, his hips rocking involuntarily against you. Every breath, yours and his. The low groan that builds in his chest when you move your attention to his pulse point, stroke the pad of your thumb over the uninjured side of his jaw as you hold him in place.

It’s been an awful long time since you did any of this sober.

That is just an observation. It’s different, that’s all. Harder and easier all at once.

He pushes at your shoulders insistently until you sit back on your haunches and budge out of the way to let him rearrange things to his fastidious standards, moving pillows and shuffling the duvet about until he’s satisfied. This is a familiar part of the ritual. For him to do something as ridiculous as have sex with you, he must first convince himself that he is as un-ridiculous as anyone ever was, that he is the master and commander of his own perennially untidy bed, that all sensible considerations have been attended to.

Usually you talk more. Well, 'usually' in the sense of how things were before the second or third time they fractured into nothing. You would have voiced your misapprehension of Evangelion lore and he would have debated the point with you until you finagled off his drawers and convinced him to have mercy, mostly by way of sucking him wordless. He would have commented on your recent manscaping job, necessary for a rather ridiculous liquid latex photoshoot a few days back, and you would have joked about your utter horror at the proximity of a razor to your nipples. He would have bruised your neck purple and made hilariously syrupy comments about this denoting you as ‘his’. You would have retaliated admirably, shoved him down and insisted he concede that, actually, it was _he_ who was _yours_.

He is not yours. You’ve told him so. It would be a lie to say otherwise. You are still at least a little his, and probably always will be. But you belong to anyone who looks at you. _Everyone_ who looks at you. A little piece for anyone inclined to tune in to channel 12, to buy you a drink, or even better, two. And also to him. He doesn’t like to share, but unfortunately, he’s designed his business model for you around it.

You’re the only one who has him _like this_ , but that’s not the same thing as _having_ him. You wonder where his mind is, as he climbs on top of you, eases you back into his elaborately engineered ergonomic pillow-assemblage. Because yours is everywhere, scattered to the winds, buffeted by the storm still raging outside. At least your body is here. That isn’t always the case when you do this stuff.

Dirk doesn’t remind you of anything but himself. He came before all the most-horrible of the horrible things locked up in your grey matter. He will always be his own kind of fraught, but also his own kind of safe. You can feel the safety, now, and everything else is white noise, easily ignored in favor of appreciating the way his hips roll over yours, the drag of cloth on cloth, the way your bodies bracket each other like a set of sameways parentheses.

He straddles you, lifts you, this time, into a renewed kiss. Gosh, but he _is_ strong. Still uncharacteristically gentle. Slowed down, you suppose, by the beating, the exhaustion. Still very, very good. You find his ass in his sweatpants, and his noise in response is appreciative, but also at least partially a laugh.

That’s nice. He used to laugh more, though it’s an incremental difference. Even while doing the ol’ twenty toes, Dirk is far from the most demonstrative in his reactions. An audible chuckle from him is as good as a belly laugh from anyone else.

You give him an admiring squeeze, then leverage your grip to rub up against him a little more freely. He grinds down on you in answer, _outrageously_ good at that, if anyone on this Godsforsaken planet knew a damn thing about any of you, it’s him they’d be slavering over, his feet at which they’d be throwing themselves. You toss back your head and groan. Your shorts are not doing jack shit to conceal _anything_ happening downstairs.

‘Riled up’, emphasis on the ‘up’, is sort of the only way to put it, heh. He cottons on quite easily to your straits, you can tell by the satisfied half-smile, but doesn’t seem too eager to do anything about it.

You don’t mind, really, provided he’s kissing you. And he is. You’re macking like a couple of desperate teenagers who’ve recently discovered areas on LOTAK where they can survive for longer than a few minutes without wearing respirators. Not quite ready for anything more, confused by what the rules even would be for the rest of the ballgame past ‘first’ or ‘second’, but there’s never been a time that you haven’t wanted him, wanted everything of him.

“Don’t know how long I can hold myself up,” he admits, interrupting the kiss to pull back slightly. “Fuck my shoulder.”

“An interesting proposition. Shall we switch it up again?” you suggest, the odd formality of the interaction and the sort-of-joke undermined slightly by the thickness of your tone, your breathing hard and uneven.

Honestly, you’re not sure you’ve enough steam in the tank or whatever for much more vigorous activity yourself, but that doesn’t mean you want to stop. It’s a strange kind of desire. A physical component, of course, but more a force, like gravity, pulling you together. You don’t want to tear off what remains of his clothes, you’re not desperate to get inside him or whatever the fuck, it’s just. It’s Dirk. You love Dirk. The Angel of Double Death himself could descend from the heavens and tell you to cut it the fuck out and you don’t think you could stop loving him. Not for all the tea in China, a country that never existed, here. Not for the world, and all the pink moscato in it.

You can find him daunting, sometimes. Incomprehensible. Im-freaking-possible to work with. Anal retentive in all the worst ways. Sensitive beyond belief, but utterly in denial about his own fragility, which makes it a billion times worse. Possessed by something sad and dark and desolate that you can’t even begin to unravel, that’s seemed to flourish in paradise, that can’t delight in any of it.

You love him, and this is immutable.

He eases down onto his less damaged shoulder, back to being face-to-face, parallel and side-ways, and you scootch in to do more kissing, to get your hand between his shoulderblades and pull him close. This whole horizontal affair might just be an excuse to touch him, to be touched by him. He’s slipped his hand up under your shorts, now, though he’s far more occupied with the curve of your ass than anything else. This position allows for very easy access. When it’s just his hands, the bruised-tailbone ache is really negligible, and he realizes quickly that you’re more than a little sore, keeps the fondling light and once again asynchronously gentle.

From here to the next bit is always the most difficult to breach. That’s where the alcohol usually comes in. You could kiss him all night, every glorious inch of his chest, his arms, corded with muscle, his neck, his face. It would take more time than exists from any linear perspective to get tired of kissing him, touching him, being close to him with the wall of emotional-and-sometimes-physical razorwire tucked away, out of sight for now.

You tried to explain the whole Sex Thing to Roxy, during one of your more emotionally intense feelings jams, sort of the last one, really, because you were getting too close to telling them things that might have something to do with Dirk and Jane. Which wouldn’t be fair. They’ve made such a protracted effort to smooth things over with Jane, after the game. That’s a friendship they’ve worked harder than _anyone_ to keep. It just wouldn’t be right. It would be callous of you, _typical_ of you, to lurch into a thorny issue and leave your pals to deal with the fallout.

But the generalities, you could talk about those. And Roxy is a good listener, and just as good as an advice-giver, even if you noticed a distinct asymmetry in who was _sharing_ what, you’ve always understood that Roxy has things they like to keep to themselves, that they’d rather not explain, and that’s fine by you, no matter how desperately curious you sometimes feel.

They did their little Roxy nod, like ‘ah, I see’, like a therapist in a movie with a little pencil-pad considering the plethora of prescriptive remedies to your vague, largely euphemistic, probably incomprehensible explanation of how you feel so damned strange, not bad, but _strange_ about the actual full-monty pants-off dance-off. After chuckling at one of your more creative euphemisms for the act, of course. Always a good way to take the pressure off, making people laugh.

“There’s probably a word for that,” they told you. “Callie’s got their stuff too. And I mean, we’ve all kinda royally been through the wringer, huh? Fuck knows we don’t gotta go into it now, but I can give ya some words to google or whatever, if you want?”

You know about the words, you already knew about the words before then, and you’ve tried them on like ill-fitting compression hosiery and they didn’t do much but make you look at yourself funny in the mirror. It’s not right, saying that you’re _not_ something. It would be so much easier if you didn’t want it, the sex or the love or the anything else. But it’s not a one-stop-shop, ‘no más, señorita!’ type situation. It’s just complicated, paralyzingly complicated. And it was complicated before all the _everything_ , you’ve always had your suspicions that something about you wasn’t quite the same as everyone else. It’s only gotten stickier and more confusing and more mired in shadow.

“Trauma stuff is like, a legit thing, too,” they added. “And it’s not like it has to be either-or? Everything’s a thing. Doesn’t just have to be somethin’ like gettin’ murdered by your wholeass brother or whatever.”

Perhaps it was somehow clear, from your expression or your posture or just the stilted way you changed the subject, that you were never going to talk to them about any of this, ever again. And you haven’t.

That’s not to say you didn’t take the offered hot-pink sticky note loaded with ‘a-’ prefixes and all manner of suffixes and have a guided look-see, now that you were really _trying_ to figure it out. It’s just never really helped with anything, sorting yourself into boxes. 

Maybe it would help, if you weren’t so very consistent about spilling out of them.

Left to your own devices, you could absolutely stall, here. Just wrapped up in him, indulgent as it gets, your bodies moving lazily against each other. Mindful of the damage, not touching it, for now. This is so much more than enough. This is more than you could ever ask for, more than you know how to ask for. The sound of the rain on the roof and his bedroom window is oddly calming, though still as ferocious as ever.

You know, mechanically, how it would work, the progression, here. You could tighten your grip, quit tracing up and down his vertebral column, counting as you go. Toy a little with the waist of his laying-around sweatpants to make your intentions clear, follow the arch of his iliac crest down. He would take you easily. You’ve certainly been at this long enough for the both of you to be _ready_ , it’s only his dignity keeping him from rutting against you, clothing be damned.

Halfway through executing what would surely be a successful maneuver, you pause, your hand heavy between his legs.

“Fuck’s sake,” he grumbles. “You’re killing me.”

You mean to apologize, but that’s quickly forgotten as he bats you away and shimmies out of his sweats altogether with a rather impressive one-handed push-up. You readily divest yourself of your shorts - you just, you needed him to get it started, that’s all. Your lips feel cold and raw without his warmth against them.

“What ought I to -” you begin to say hesitantly, but he gives you an almost anguished look at that, which shuts you right up.

“Don’t do that. Please don’t do that - thing. Not with me. Just fuck me, okay?”

If you had the slightest backbone, one single vertebra of a fucking spine, you would stop him here. Ask him what the devil he means by that, do something about the sense of injustice stoked by the… what does he think you’re _doing_? You’re not doing anything! You’re never doing anything! You’re an unbearably shitty actor and a _shittier_ liar and he must know that, he tells you every fucking time you bungle a line or make a jackanapes of yourself at a Q-and-A panel and it hurts, it does, but he’s right, and he’s _wrong_ this time if he thinks that’s what’s going on here!

You don’t want to ruin it. This most recent bout of coldness, on his part, the months of protracted silence, business-only, it’s taken something out of you. It’s been that much harder, since you’ve eased away from Roxy, too, since all that leaves is Jane, and every interaction with her, however well-meaning, is clouded with guilt and nerves and, more often than not, a pre-game, game, and post-game half bottle of wine.

Ultimately, that particular means of dealing with an untenable reality just upsets Dirk more, because then you show up on the cover of some magazine or several, having leaked a spoiler or dropped some stupid comment about the show over a fancy dinner or else thrown up in somebody’s pool, and now it’s him and Jane who have to manage the fallout.

You make a noise of acquiescence, in lieu of any less chicken-hearted comments. Maybe you do just want to fuck him. Maybe you just want him to shut up, and that’s the only way you can coexist for longer than a few minutes.

Bolstering him with one arm, guiding him with another, his thigh hitched up over your hip, you slide into him, crush his body to your chest, bury your face in his mess of curls so you don’t have to look at him. His leave-in conditioner smells like citrus and shea butter. He spent a full afternoon trying to alchemize a proper replica when you located your first grist cache.

There would be no reason to do this if you didn’t love him, and you do, with every fiber of your heart, every shred of your soul. You love him, you love him, you love him. He could kill you and you’d love him, in the act, in death itself.

You grip him firmly by the injured shoulder and bury yourself in him, exactly the way you know he wants. He groans, in relief and pain and ecstasy, the way you knew he would. He likes it when it hurts. You’re pretty sure he doesn’t feel like he deserves it when it doesn’t.

When he cants his head up to kiss you, it’s all teeth. Blood on your lips, hot on your tongue, and you couldn’t say whose it is. He always does this to you. You wish he wouldn’t. You wish you could go back to before, when he would let you treat him like the precious thing he is. When he would believe you, or try to, when you said it.

Really, you don’t think you were lying.

Now that you’ve gotten started, it would be near impossible to stop. He doesn’t ask you to. Neither of you say a word. He’s not a small man, but you’re certifiably a large one, and you move him easily to your liking, and he helps, pushing back in tandem, deeper and harder, his short-trimmed nails digging into your biceps as he shudders and moans. Or maybe that sound is you. Hard to tell, so very close to each other.

He hasn’t painted his nails since filming started. They distract from his character, he says. You always liked it, found it rather sweet, like his hands were all dressed up for a little black-tie hand-party or something. The places where they meet your skin feel wet, sting like ten lit matches searing into you. If you could see them, from this angle, they’d be a lovely candy red.

You’re getting close, despite yourself. You don’t _like_ pain, never saw a use for it, and acts of venery are typically no exception, but _dear lord_ , the fucking head rush of seeing him lose even an ounce of his usually _apodeictic_ self control is overwhelming. The way he moves is incomparable.

And he knows exactly where you are. Probably before you did. He braces himself in your grip and intensifies his pace, his own breathing gone quick and desperate.

“Come on,” he growls. You’re not sure if he’s talking to you or to himself, and you try your best to be accommodating, to shift your angle of entry just slightly upward, to go harder, to hold him closer. He claws at you like a cat as he loses the rhythm of his rolling thrusts, stills marginally, shudders in your hands. “Come on, come - ah, fuck, that’s… that’s good, fuck. Don’t, don’t stop, don’t fucking _stop_!”

You slow a touch, as his paroxysms ebb, in case he’s done. He takes this as some kind of indignity, though, and doesn’t let up for even a second, though his expression is screwed tight with overstimulation.

He kisses you very sweetly, almost chaste, and smears blood down your cheek with a gentle hand, and that’s what does it for you, in the end. That does it, and you hold him hard enough to crush him were he not tense with the effort of pushing you over the edge.

You slump, panting, against the pillows, suddenly very grateful for the configuration he created earlier. He extricates himself from your lax grip, doesn’t look at you out of more than the corner of his eye.

“Gotta wash up,” he informs you, and disappears into the shadowy hallway.

“Dirk, can’t you -” you begin to plead, though you hear the pathetic, plaintive edge to your tone, and you can’t bring yourself to finish the sentence.

You dry yourself off with your discarded shorts, then dig around in his sleek, modern dresser until you find something that originally belonged to you, which does not take very long. Habitual clothing-thief that he is, there’s a neatly laundered pair of boxers in the top drawer that you’ve been missing for a few years and have occasionally seen him wear in the intervening period. A soft, washed-thin heart aspect shirt you used to wear often, as a jape, until he declared a firm ‘no doubles’ edict and stole it for his own use. For pajamas, he informed you, since it’s big enough on him to be a dress, and he doesn’t roll with that shit.

It all smells like his conditioner, somehow. Just a little, not overwhelmingly. Did he alchemize a laundry soap with the same scent? You wouldn’t put it past him. The man likes what he likes.

Snuggling back into his bed, you smush your face into a pillow that is still body-heat-warm, and wish that his ‘washing up’ didn’t inevitably take longer than most people’s full-body depilatory sessions. You could do with a cuddle, right about now. You used to think you weren’t that sort of person. It was a daunting idea, after all, sharing your body with someone else on its own merits, nothing promised, nothing inherently gained but proximity to it. So many secret-meanings and shadow-covenants in potentia.

You’re not so chary about such things, any more. Those sorts of anxieties just aren’t sustainable with your current lifestyle. If you make a promise you can’t keep, you will simply have to break it. It is still a terrifying prospect, letting people down, but the exposure therapy of _existence_ has really done the trick, made it a touch easier to swallow.

As you suspected, you can’t sleep. Got a little too much earlier, and all your aches and pains feel fresh again, what with the exertion. You gaze at the ceiling and don’t think, float up somewhere else and live there for a while. You don’t need alcohol to do this, just a good reason.

His shower isn’t audible over the continued sounds of rain, thunder, lightning, the works.

How strange, a storm like this. After a few years of going without, you’d forgotten they were even a possibility. Loads, of course, buffeted your childhood home, once upon a time. But that was to be expected. This, here on Earth C, this was all supposed to be so very different.

And yet. If this were a spot the difference puzzle, you would be losing at it. Can’t find more than two or three, and they might just be misprints. You hope you’ll feel better, come the morning, once the elemental ridiculousness is past. You hope you’ll feel better.

You stare at the slight texture of the white paint, only a few years old, like the structure itself, and count how long you can go between blinks.

It’s less than an hour, certainly, before he returns, fully blown-dry and tidied up, stark naked until he reaches the furniture you recently pawed about in. You can see him register your freshly-clothedness, what you must have done. You watch him pull on a shirt, which has Hatsune Miku on it, and almost neon-orange boxers.

“You stuck around,” he observes.

Your face heats up a bit.

“You offered.”

“Sure did.”

When he settles into bed, he leaves an improbable foot of space between you. It’s not _that_ capacious of a bed, damn it.

 _Is something the matter?_ That’s what you want to ask. Or maybe _I’m jonesing for a little after-the-dickening cool-down snuggle time, bro, a little reassurance that you don’t hate me more than I suspect you already do because I went and did all that, be a sport, huh?_. You’d settle for a _come here, won’t you_ , but your lips don’t move.

He rolls over to look at you. Still tired-eyed.

You smile hopefully. His brows press a fraction of a centimeter closer together, and you can feel your expression waver, you can feel him _hating_ you, even if not especially post-act. Was it even worth it, an hour of pretending that he didn’t?

Despite the dread coiling in your chest, you try again, try to summon up a better smile.

He doesn’t do anything. You can feel his eyes on you, can see the gears turning behind deep brown irises.

You give it another go. Just - if he would just give you something, here, if he would just react, would just tell you what the shit he’s ever thinking, you’d take _anything_ , and you have the means to ask for _nothing_.

“It’s killing you,” he says. “That I won’t smile back.”

_What?_

Something in your background-brain sputters to a halt.

“No,” you insist. “No, not at all, not… you don’t have to do anything! I don’t mind at all, I didn’t even notice, I just… gosh, but I just wanted you to know how _I_ was feeling, to convey it clearly, that’s the only reason, there aren’t any strings to that, goodness gracious.”

He makes a dull, huff-y kind of noise, rolling onto his back.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “Really, I am. I don’t know how to talk to you. I just want whatever is happening to stop happening. It - maybe it is killing me, but it’s not just that, alright? Did I do something wrong? I feel like I must have done something… wrong-er than usual. But I truly don’t know what it was, if you’d just tell me what I did -”

“God, please, stop.”

You stop.

“It’s not you.”

That’s a lie. He’s lying, and he won’t even do it to your face.

“There’s just. A lot of shit going on. I don’t like acting like this any more than you do, alright? I don’t get a huge fucking kick out of being _angry_ all the goddamn time, for no fucking reason, it’s not - it’s not you. It’s not just you. I basically bit Roxy’s head off the other day for _nothing_ , for asking me something random about Jane’s birthday gift, and if you think that doesn’t make me feel like the scum of the fucking earth…”

“You’re not -”

“I know I’m not! I swear to fuck, I know, I _know_ , okay? On an intellectual level, at least, I can… acknowledge that. That I’m acting _psychotic_ , I don’t sleep anymore, not _really_ , I don’t - I don’t. I sound fucking insane. But I could be… a hell of a lot worse, right?”

“Well, sure,” you say vaguely, back to looking at the ceiling, trying to unplug your brain so your stomach won’t do sick, roller-coaster flips at the things he’s saying. Surprised that he’s let you get a full two-word thought out, and continues to be silent as you search for more words. “I mean. It’s alright, Dirk. You’re not…”

Back to that again, are you. You must be the least comforting person in all of paradox space.

“After we god tiered,” he says. “A whole bunch of shit happened. I wasn’t there for it, but I’ve heard. Secondhand, I mean. Obviously. D’you remember any of that?”

You swallow, your throat suddenly bone dry.

Luckily, he doesn’t expect an answer, it seems. That was rhetorical. Oh thank fuck.

“And something in a theater? Am I losing my mind? I wasn’t _there_ , but I was. At least the Derse dreaming shit made sense. None of this makes sense. Doesn’t even feel like a nightmare. Just like remembering something that didn’t happen to me. But it’s me. It was me. And it feels so fucking real. And I can’t give a shit about anything else, with this insane bullshit going on, but I can’t just _stop_ , I’ve worked like hell, it’s been years putting all of this together, and it’d just take one slip-up to lose it. Fragile-ass build for a fragile-ass universe.”

You wince involuntarily at his tone, raw and heavy with something breaking through the fracture-lines of his typical flat-affected delivery.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take it. I don’t know how deep the rabbit-hole goes, and I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I keep trying to pull the emergency break, whoa there, Bessie, this ain’t goin’ anywhere I’m gonna like when we get there. But I get started with something and _I can’t stop_.” He shuffles a hand through his hair, scrunching at his curls, tendons standing out in his forearms. “Is any of this even real? Is this actually how shit goes for me? Is _this_ how I fucking lose it? This is pathetic. Skaia must be rolling on the fucking floor laughing. After everything. I gotta be the only motherfucker who could be such a miserable piece of shit in paradise.”

Alright, perhaps this isn’t entirely about you, then, though it might as well be. He’s not giving you much in terms of how to help him. Maybe you’re supposed to have already come up with the answer?

“Should we call off the show?” you suggest. “If it’s stress getting the best of you, here -”

“ _We_ aren’t going to do anything. If you could show up sober and on time, maybe once or twice a week, that’d be a start.”

You blink. Ah, right. This problem isn’t you, but all the others still are.

“Fuck. You should go. You should just - I can’t do this right now, this was unbelievably stupid. I should know better. I’ll just. I’ll just do the fucking finale. I’ll finish this, and I’ll take a break and handle my shit. And maybe you shouldn’t come over until then.”

“But Dirk!”

“Do you want a fucking fight right now?”

“It’s… still raining,” you say quietly. “And you said I could stay.”

_And I don’t want to go. I know you’re going to do the same thing you always do. Act so normal that I forget it’s not real, wall me out all over again, you know me too fucking well, you know I want to believe you’re alright and everything’s hunky dory and you’re just outgrowing me. But you’re not. Can’t you hear yourself? Don’t you know how much it scares me, leaving you alone when you’re like this? If I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be Just or Heroic, for fuck's sake, I’d worry - I’d think you might - you’ve done it before, haven’t you? And you can’t leave me here, Dirk, I can’t do anything without you, you’re right! I don’t talk to anyone, I don’t do anything, I just fuck around trying not to off myself until my phone lights up orange-ways, how can you fucking say this isn’t real, how dare you call this fake? It may be some dire fucking shit, Dirk, but it’s all we have! What else is there? Where else is there for you to go? Please, dear god, if you’ve found somewhere else, won’t you bring me along? I don’t care if it’s hell! This is hell, Dirk, I wish I was dead half the time and everything I do to forget that makes it feel worse! I think I just made it worse again! I think… I think…_

You think, but you don’t say.

“Fine,” he tells you. “Whatever. I’m moving out. It’s not doing me any good, hanging around here. Just do the finale. That’s all you have to do. Skip the promo shit if you’re really that desperate to get out of participating in your own fucking show. Three hours of your life, then you’re free.”

“I’m not desperate to…” you say quietly, trailing off before you can finish, effectively interrupting yourself. “I like spending time with you.”

“Well, you know where I live,” he replies.

“I like having you here. It doesn’t put me out at all.”

“Ain’t that just the American fucking dream. Picket fence, sprawling McMansion in the ‘burbs, your asshole ex boyfriend living in an apartment overhead like it’s Foucault’s panopticon of drunken interspecies orgies, I get it.”

“That’s a little low, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

“Now I think _you’re_ trying to start a fight,” you huff, pressing the pillow you’ve gotten all snuggled up with closer to your chest, feeling very like an overgrown child, which you do not like one bit. Who is he to lecture you, anyway, to bring Foucault into your _perfectly_ healthy sex life, which you actually enjoy a lot, thanks, and have no problems with at all? Ever?

Eurgh.

“I’m sorry,” he says, to the opposite wall.

“Good. You ought to be,” you snap. Then, in a quieter voice, “I don’t want you to move out.”

“The day you figure out what you _do_ want, let me know. We’ll throw a party. Jane’ll make cupcakes. It’ll be a grand old time.”

_I want you here, just not so close that I suffocate. I want to stop measuring everything by how it was before. I want to forget the things that won’t leave me alone. I want to just be happy with my lot. I want us all to be friends, like we used to be, like we never really were, I guess, if it could all fall apart so easily. I want you to roll over and put your head on my shoulder and sleep there like it’s the safest place you can imagine, like I’m doing something good for you just by existing. I just want you to touch me._

“I want to go to sleep.”

“Makes two of us. G’night, Jake.”

“Good night, Dirk.”

The last view you get of him, before he flicks off the bedside lamp with an arduous stretch, is of his face contorted in pain. He’ll cave in and bring you to Jane in the morning. There will be a scripting session, an aesthetic consultation, a fitting and a styling and a laying-out of the new stage, for use on Monday night. You will find it all atrociously boring and scam an edible or a fifth of vodka or better yet, both, off a consort cameraman or your troll stylist, a rather charming indigo who you have been meaning to get to know better.

It won’t fix anything, the peek beneath the hood, knowing how bad it’s gotten. You’re no mechanic. No friend to him, let alone a partner. You’ll play one on TV. He’ll seem fine, for the most part, as fine as he has ever been. You’ll be able to ignore that it happened, it’ll fade into a memory, and not even one with teeth. His increasing hauntedness, his isolation, the worried texts from Jane you still don’t know how to answer, it’ll be a check engine light in your Honda Civic, but one you can put a smiley-face sticker over and ignore until the car won’t start.

You will try. You will fail resoundingly, and try again, to help him. You will give up on trying, and wait for him to come to you. He sometimes will. Eventually, he will break you into a million pieces for what you’ve done to him. He will take you by the cerebrum and squeeze until you pop.

You will deserve it. You will deserve it. You will deserve it.

Sometimes, in moments like these, curled up and might-as-well-be-alone in the bed of a man who has every right to hate you, your subconscious gives you a respite from all the everything. You do have happy memories, after all. And they can serve as a potent balm to a near intolerable present, the raging elements, the cold space between you, the itching of dried blood in crescent shapes on your shoulders, the knowledge that this went about as badly as it could have gone, and next time, it will almost certainly go worse. 

Sometimes, your brain takes pity on you, spits out some good-dream brain juice, lets you rest.

This is not one of those times.

**Author's Note:**

> Shot, [chaser](https://twitter.com/tomatograter/status/1156774212562034695).


End file.
